Discussion with Dr. Rebecca Hall and Kerri K. Greenidge

Celebrate Dr. Rebecca Hall’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts on Thursday, June 17 at 7 PM!

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts
Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour-de-force that tells the story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record.

Wake tells the story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the “negro burying ground” uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere.

Rebecca Hall, JD, Ph.D., is a scholar, activist, and educator. After graduating from Berkeley Law in 1989, she represented low-income tenants and homeless families for eight years before returning to get her Ph.D. in history. She has taught at UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley Law, Berkeley’s history department, and as a visiting professor of law at the University of Utah. She writes and publishes on the history of race, gender, law, and resistance as well as articles on climate justice and intersectional feminist theory. Rebecca has been an activist her entire life, fighting for women’s and LGBT rights and against nuclear weapons, Apartheid, and US militarism. She is dedicated to the movement for Climate Justice and is also currently involved with Black Lives Matter and rapid response support for families facing deportation. She is currently working on her second graphic novel on Black women and Reconstruction. Dr. Hall’s work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the American Association of University Women, The Ford Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. You can find out more about her at RebHallPhD.org.

Kerri K. Greenidge is Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. She is also the award-winning author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, a New York Times notable book of 2019.